Her obstetrician urged them to keep trying. Jules wanted another baby. A playmate for Brooks. The tests had been done. So much blood pulled from her veins that the inside of her elbows seemed perpetually black and blue. No immune system hiccups. No hypo-or hyperthyroid disease. Cyst-free, diabetes-free. Hormones balanced. Cervix intact. Uterus shaped just as nature intended. It was a mystery to every doctor and midwife and specialist. A mystery that felt anything but mysterious when she saw the blood on her panties. Red like her mother’s prizewinning American Beauties. She remembered a poem she’d read in college. When reading poetry at night under her covers, hiding from Sister Mary Bartholomew had felt like a rebellion. The blood flood is the flood of love.
She walked into her high school’s twentieth reunion with Jules in a wide-lapel Armani suit she’d splurged on (thanks to the Amex card her mother let her use, a secret she kept from Jules), and armed with a wallet stuffed with photos of baby Brooks. Her dress a size 2, she’d never looked better. The scraping of her uterus only a few weeks prior had made her lose her appetite. She was happy to be there. To see old friends. But also to be seen. Leslie Day Marshall, transformed into a woman so different from the rest of the island girls, with her city life, her black husband, her social work making the world a better place. Her longtime suspicions confirmed—she was better than the island. She listened to the tipsy chatter of her former classmates—their Lilly Pulitzer sleeveless shifts traded for shoulder pads and snakeskin pumps. As the night wore on, the chatter turned to tears and she squeezed their acrylic-nail-tipped fingers as they talked of the babies they’d lost. Sheila McCafferty. Loreen Brice. Genevieve Smith. Ginny Pencott. On and on. An island’s worth of mourning mothers.
She had a friend who worked at the CDC. A shy brainy biologist she and Jules had met through meetings with Earth First! and who she suspected was sweet on her, and so she called him and invited him to dinner. Asked him to tell her everything he knew about biomonitoring and if it was possible to measure the toxic chemicals in a person’s body. What if, she asked, those poisons had been in her blood and bones and tissue from the very beginning, when she was just a baby herself, sucking her thumb in her own mother’s polluted womb?
27.
Dom
He walked the perimeter of the woods around the Castle—there was a real rager in the ballroom tonight; he’d heard the thumping bass all the way from the cottage. He was on his second loop. The caterpillars were loud. Like they were competing with the music pouring from the Castle ballroom. He’d sworn an oath to the Colonel that he’d keep an eye out and “report back anything cockamamie” and so he would do one more loop.
He heard the voices—one high and bright, the other low and lazy. He hid behind a massive oak covered with caterpillars. Big fat fuzzy ones that looked as if they had molted at least three or four times. He was fascinated with the little beasts’ transformation—they could go from one inch and lightly bristled to three inches long and so hairy he couldn’t figure out how, crawling all over one another in a big caterpillar orgy, their bristles didn’t get tangled.
The leaves were so thinned out, there weren’t that many places a secret spy could hide these days in the woods of Avalon Island. He hustled forward a few feet and ducked behind a paper birch. Someone had wrapped the trunk in burlap to catch the gypsies and the sack was slung low like there were hundreds trapped inside.
He was at the edge of the forest, where the trees turned to a cloud of fern and bramble and vines, when he heard the girl’s voice again and knew it was Maddie. He stopped himself, just barely, from launching out of the woods and scaring the shit out of them. He watched for a moment—she and Brooks so close it was as if they were wearing the same zipped sweatshirt, and when he stepped out into the light of the Castle’s driveway, the old-school gas lamps lit and flickering, he saw they really were wearing the same sweatshirt, the zipper pulled all the way to the top so it glinted at the top of Maddie’s back.
“Hi guys,” he said, not wanting to startle them but he did and they stumbled and almost fell on the grass. They laughed—Brooks reaching his arms around Maddie to unzip the sweatshirt, she looking up at Brooks all lovey-eyed the whole time.
Hello? Dom wanted to say. Remember me? Your brother? Who you haven’t spoken to in days? But he knew that would only make him sound pathetic, so he said the first thing that popped into his head, “Want to play?” He thumbed behind him at the woods.
Maddie lifted herself on her toes and bit her bottom lip and Dom knew she wanted to.
“Play what?” Brooks said, lifting his brows and looking down at Maddie.
“We’ll show you!” Maddie said, and grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the woods.
“In there?” Brooks said, stopping short so the soles of his Converse skidded across the driveway, scattering stones. “With those things?”
“It’s cool,” Dom said, desperate to make this guy believe him. It had been ages since he played the game, and ages upon ages since Maddie had played. “We’ll be moving around the whole time. And they’re starting to retreat. Into their cocoons.”
“Yeah?” Brooks said. “Sounds to me like they’re louder than ever. Like the caterpillar troops have multiplied.”
Dom laughed, but Maddie stepped forward, hands on her hips. “You scared, tough guy?” Then she took off into the woods, her arms pumping, leaping over the ferns.
“Shit,” Brooks said and jogged after her.
Dom tried to talk slowly, but he was so excited and there was so much to say. How would they pick the perfect myth to reenact? He thought of famous battle scenes—the felling of Achilles by Paris in the Trojan War with a single arrow to the heel, or they could do Achilles slaying the great warrior Hector, and, since they’d never played with another boy before (Maddie was awesome at fighting, but she was still a girl), they could do the battle of Zeus and the Olympians against their greedy, baby-swallowing father, Cronus, and his fellow Titans. Yes, that was so obviously the one!
“You guys,” Dom called, “I have a great idea.”
Maddie and Brooks were standing on a fallen log by the circle of stumps Dom liked to imagine had once been an ancient Native American meeting place.
“We already picked one,” Maddie said. Even in the faint moonlight, Dom could feel she was smiling. It was good to have her back.
“How about the war of the Olympians and the Titans?” he said. “How epic is that?”
“We’re going to do Orpheus and Eurydice,” she said. Then, to Brooks, “It’s the most tragic love story ever.”
There was a beat of silence between them, filled by the drone of the caterpillars and the thump of the techno radiating from the Castle.
“Cool,” Brooks said. “I guess that makes me…” He looked at Maddie.
“Orpheus, silly! And I’m the devastatingly beautiful and virtuous Eurydice. Dead by a snakebite while fleeing from the rapist,” she paused. “I can’t remember his name, but whatever.”
“Aristaeus,” Dom said, exaggerating his impatience, hoping she saw what happened when she took time off from the game. “The shepherd.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “The raping shepherd.”
Brooks spoke, “This is some heavy shit.”
“And you,” Maddie said, taking Brooks’s hands and spinning him in a circle so the forest floor whispered under their feet, “You are Orpheus, son of Apollo, a great musician. When I died, you played your lyre—it’s like a guitar. Sort of.”
“Not really,” Dom said.